In recent years, a technology called OpenFlow has been proposed (refer to Non-Patent Literatures 1 and 2). OpenFlow treats communication as an end-to-end flow, and a central control apparatus called OpenFlow controller performs route control, failure recovery, load balancing, and optimization for each flow by controlling an OpenFlow switch.
Patent Literature 1 discloses a configuration that enables a user to view content with a bandwidth guarantee when he views it from a content server across a plurality of ISPs. According to the literature, out of two communication apparatuses (DTE-a and the content server α) that perform data forwarding across a plurality of ISPs (ISP-a and ISP-b) on the Internet, one of the communication apparatuses applies to a bandwidth allocation intermediate server (broker server β) that brokers the allocation of transmission bandwidth on the Internet to allocate bandwidth for a data transmission path on which data is transmitted, and the bandwidth allocation intermediate server allocates the transmission bandwidth for the data transmission path on behalf of the two communication apparatuses.
[Patent Literature 1]
Japanese Patent Kokai Publication No. JP-P2002-344499A
[Non-Patent Literature 1]
Nick McKeown, et. al. “OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks,” [online], [searched on Feb. 8, 2012], the Internet <URL: http://www.openflow.org/documents/openflow-wp-latest.pdf>
[Non-Patent Literature 2]
“OpenFlow Switch Specification” Version 1.1.0 Implemented (Wire Protocol 0x02), [online], [searched on Feb. 8, 2012], the Internet <URL: http://www.openflow.org/documents/openflow-spec-v1.1.0.pdf>